NetApp Invests in Cloud Data Protection Firm Datos IO

May 11, 2017

Datos IO, a San Jose, Calif.-based cloud data protection and management firm, announced this week that both NetApp and Cisco had made strategic investments in the company. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Offering a glimpse into NetApp's motivation for investing in the startup, the storage systems maker's CTO Mark Bregman praised Datos IO's "unique architecture approach and differentiated capabilities in data protection and data mobility complement our Data Fabric strategy, which is focused on providing rich enterprise data management services," in prepared remarks. "We are impressed with Datos IO's execution to date as they expand their business in the fast-growing segment of third-platform applications."

According to IDC, third platform describes the current IT environment characterized by the cloud, mobile, social and big data. In contrast to earlier eras of computing, when enterprises generally dictated the pace of development and innovation, the third platform emphasizes the needs of consumers, forcing enterprises to adjust their business models.

Datos IO believes that just as the IT industry has evolved, so must the data backup market.

The company emerged from stealth in September 2015, after having raised $15.25 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners and True Ventures and an assortment of angel investors. The company's CEO and co-founder, Tarun Thakur, hailed from Data Domain (EMC), Veritas and IBM Research. Dr. Prasenjit Sarkar, CTO and co-founder, spent 15 years at IBM Research.

RecoverX software from Datos IO offers data protection for third-platform applications and multi-cloud environments, including backup and recovery for big data file systems and support for Microsoft SQL databases hosted in the cloud or on-premises. Last week, the company announced RecoverX 2.0 with new data management capabilities including the migration of non-recovery workloads to across clouds.

Since the June 2016 release of Recover X, the company has attracted its share of high-profile clients, including eBay, Barracuda Networks and OpenTable. Two months later, the company joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network, enabling customers to run Recover X on the cloud giant's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and store backups on Simple Storage Service (S3).

In terms of the future, Thakur said his company "will be closely collaborating with NetApp and Cisco teams in coming up with reference architectures and end-to-end solutions to help customers protect their application workloads for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments," in a blog post.

"The teams have already made tremendous progress: NetApp and Datos IO for third platform applications and Cisco ACI [Application Centric Infrastructure] and Cisco UCS [Unified Computing System] and Datos IO — both these solutions are available for customers worldwide," added Thakur.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.